them at a discount was made punishable with twenty years'
imprisonment with hard labour,[765] and they fell ultimately to
waste-paper value. A pair of boots worth thirty francs in gold cost
10,000 francs in paper. On paper all were immensely rich. Yet the
masses were starving. Unfortunately people cannot live by consuming
unlimited quantities of credit notes. They can become prosperous
neither by robbing the rich nor by calling a shilling a sovereign, but
only by producing more. Greater wealth means simply increased
consumption, and increased consumption, unless based on increased
production, can only be effected by intrenching upon and diminishing
the national capital, the national reserve store of food, clothing,
tools, &c., and thus causing widespread misery and starvation.

FOOTNOTES:

[751] Bebel, _Woman in the Past, Present, and Future_, p. 192.

[752] Leatham, _Socialism and Character_, p. 90.

[753] Blatchford, _Merrie England_, p. 100.

[754] Gronlund, _Co-operative Commonwealth_, p. 103.

[755] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 157.

[756] Kautsky, _The Social Revolution_, p. 14.

[757] Jowett, _The Socialist and the City_, p. 44.

[758] Davidson, _The Old Order and the New_, p. 57.

[759] McLachlan, _The Tyranny of Usury_, p. 1.

[760] _Ibid._ pp. 10, 17.

[761] _How to Finance Municipal Enterprises_, pp. 3-5.

[762] McLachlan, _The Tyranny of Usury_, p. 20.

[763] _Ibid._

[764] _Nouvelle Biographie Generale_, vol. xxxv. p. 39.

[765] Roscher, _System_, p. 227.

CHAPTER XXI

SOME SOCIALIST VIEWS ON FREE TRADE AND PROTECTION

In his thoughtful book on Socialism, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., the
Socialist leader, attributes the rise of the Socialist movement in
great Britain to various causes, one of which is "the reaction against
Manchesterism."[766]

Socialists, generally speaking, are opposed to Free Trade. Neither the
moderate nor the revolutionary sections of British Socialism have a
good word to say for it. The Socialist leaders, looking at the
question of Free Trade and Protection from the worker's point of view,
have arrived with Lecky at the conclusion that the whole Liberal Free
Trade agitation is one of the greatest political impostures which the
world has witnessed,[767] a view which, by the by, was also expressed
by Bismarck.[768]

Socialists are not under any illusion as to the causes which led to
the introduction of Free Trade into Great Britain, and th